Oct 10, 2008

NextGen Player Review: Too Human

Too Human, you either love it or you hate it... Looking at the other reviews of this game most sites seem disappointed by the latest from Silicon Knights.

I however fall into the group of people that liked the game. A hard core dungeon crawler with lots of baddies to kill, constant action and so many choices for weapons, armour and appearance you are never stuck in the same location for long. The satisfaction of item drops and item creation, frequent upgrades and a system to harvest old items in order to build new ones is actually quite rewarding.

The switching back and forth between the two realities was also something that offered a slight variation to the normal gaming experience. Complete an action in Virtual Reality to accomplish something in the real world. Open gates, trigger switches and collect special VR powers to advance your character's level.

I think many people are just too used to the standard "Button Mashing" required in games like Too Human, in this case you are mashing the right Analog stick. I could see why some game sites would review that as a negative - it's not automatically intuitive to most gamers and actually takes about an hour to get fully accustomed to.

The robotic enemies you face will adapt as Baldur (the main character) evolves and with the increasing difficulties and increasing number of enemies thus draw to the forefront the major flaw that drove me crazy as a player... you die and you die and you die... and each time you die a Valkyrie cut scene (that you can't skip!) takes place where she descends from the sky to take your body away. Then you are back in the fray fighting the same enemy that just killed you and this is where things can get repetitive. Fight, die, cut scene, fight, die, cut scene.

Also, being a trilogy this game feels short. My first play through the game lasted about 20 hours. Oblivion took 140 hours to fully complete (including the Shivering Isles) with a rather abrupt ending I was left wanting to know more, wanting to fight more creatures, and wanting to continue the story line but only credits were there to greet me.

All in all I really liked this game but I didn't "Love" it. Because of the vast difference of opinions on this game you may want to rent this and only buy it if you liked it - I'm glad I got my copy.

In the end I'd wrap up by saying all the haters of this game go back and play it again and give the controls a real run for their money. Once you get used to them you are going to like this game.